Our team has been as busy as ever! As summer is coming to an end, we’re still improving on our Prisma control panel, ramping up our support and sales efforts, and improving location offerings. As for the past month, we’ve reached out to select individuals to test some new locations, however, we still need additional feedback for one location: Dallas, Texas, USA!

If you’re interested in a free server in Dallas and are willing to provide some feedback, we’d love to have you try out this new location! Towards the end of the week test period, we will send you an email asking for feedback, and if completed, we will credit your CubedHost account with $8.30 USD, enough for a 1GB server in Dallas, TX once it’s launched!

While the team has been hard at work to move everyone over to our new control panel, we’ve also been collecting valuable feedback from you about what features and improvements we can continue to work on to make your experience with CubedHost even better.

One of those improvements is continually expanding our datacenter presence to provide you with the best location and lowest ping for you and your players. Our newest datacenter in Chicago, Illinois quickly became one of our fastest growing after its launch in December. We’re back with another opportunity to get a free Minecraft server and test out our newest, upcoming datacenter, this time in Miami, Florida, USA.

Your server will run for around 7 days then cancel automatically. Shortly afterwards, we’ll email you a quick survey to fill out. Send that back to us and we’ll give you $5 USD account credit. Once we get feedback from everyone, we’ll review feedback, and make sure hardware, network, and DDoS protection performance are all up to our strict standards. If all goes well, you should hear about the official launch shortly!

We sent out invites to our active customers with US-based Minecraft servers earlier this week to kickstart our Prisma Early Access program. Since then, we’ve filled up a few nodes with test servers and gotten some really awesome bug reports and feedback. I’d like to take the opportunity to give a little background about our plans for releasing Prisma.

Back in late 2015, we announced an open beta period for Prisma to gather feedback, get suggestions, and find bugs. We ran the beta for a few months in early 2016 and got lots of feedback from our users. After the beta ended, we took this feedback and spent ~6 months continuing development on the control panel, adding new features, fixing critical bugs, and enhancing the experience overall. As a small team, it’s been an incredible effort and lots of sleepless nights, but Prisma is now very close to release.

We’re continuing our trend of gathering invaluable feedback from our users and customers with Prisma Early Access. Throughout November, we want to see how our software performs under real world conditions with real users. This is going to be our final testing period before moving customers from Multicraft over to Prisma and provisioning new servers directly on Prisma. Our goal is to build the future of CubedHost around Prisma — the new platform will allow us to support more game servers with ease, while being able to implement suggestions directly from our customers in less time. It’s more important than ever for us to gather feedback during this testing period, so we’re now opening it up to the public.

Sign up for free to test Prisma and get a 1GB Minecraft server

Early access testing is over, thanks for your help! 🙂

Sign up with the link above and get a free server on Prisma right away. You’ll also get a first-hand look at our newest location and datacenter: Chicago, IL, USA! We’ll send out a survey to get some feedback from you after a few days and if you can spare the time to fill it out, we’d really appreciate it. It helps us improve our service and continue to offer the highest quality Minecraft servers 🙂

We’ve been excitedly watching the progress made by the iTX Technologies team on Genisys – a fork of PocketMine-MP with tons of awesome improvements. Just a couple days ago, a huge update with proper support for Minecraft Windows 10 Edition was released. This update has already been pulled into our system and is available on all MCPE servers today. Check out the details below and read more about the changes here.

Major Features and Bug Fixes

Crafting

Inventory anti-cheat (prevents item duping)

Press Q to drop items one at a time

Left-click-drag

Hotbar now works properly on both PE and Win10.

Anvils closing immediately when used is fixed.

Inventory bugs fixed.

Held item sending

Armor vanishing bug fixed.

Creative mode bugs fixed.

Items no longer reappear in your inventory when being move to a chest.

How can I get this on my MCPE server?

All you have to do is select the “Genisys: MCPE 0.15.4 (Latest | API 2.0 | PHP7)” server type in your control panel, save, and restart your server. This server type will automatically update as the Genisys team pushes out new features and fixes, just restart your server to obtain the latest update.

Over this past week, two of our team members flew out to Ashburn, Virginia to begin a 4-day process of provisioning new server infrastructure. Our goal was to build off of the existing hardware configurations we’ve used for the past 4 years, upgrading to the latest technologies available and ultimately creating an even more lag-free environment for Minecraft servers.

All hardware and network equipment went through rigorous testing and has been setup in advance of our upcoming maintenances in order to ensure maximum performance and to prevent possible outages from hardware failures.

It was a gloomy and rainy start in both Dallas and Ashburn at the airports, but it was well worth the trip! Over the next 4 weeks, we will be sending out maintenance emails according to our schedule and migrating customers to the upgraded systems. You can check out the hardware and specs below.

The Numbers

66x 16GB DDR4-2133 ECC RAM (over 1TB total!)

34x Samsung 850 Pro SSDs

2x 8-node Supermicro Microcloud systems

16x Intel Xeon E3-1240 v5 CPUs

1x Intel Xeon E3-1220 v5 CPU

1x 1U Supermicro system (for out-of-band management)

The Hardware

CPUs

SSDs

RAM

Network Cables

Assembly, Racking, and Cabling

Microclouds and rack from the front, drive bays visible

Intel Xeon E3-1240 v5 CPU up close

Microcloud blades up close

Cable management completed

Hope you enjoyed the sneak peak at our new Ashburn, VA infrastructure! If you have any questions or want to get in touch with our team, feel free to contact us via live chat or ticket. We’re always happy to answer any questions you might have, and we’d love to help you start your next Minecraft server.

It’s been about 6 months since our last update and definitely overdue. We’re nearing completion with just a few key features left to finish up. I want to take a moment to talk a little bit about why it’s taking so long to finish, then we can look at some of the latest screenshots. The beta program will be shutting down this weekend but it shouldn’t be too long before you can make the official switch to Prisma as a CubedHost customer.

Background

We set out with one goal: creating the best control panel possible to make managing your Minecraft servers as easy as possible, while still providing all of the features you already know and love and without taking away advanced features. We originally planned to slowly replace Multicraft one piece at a time, but found early on that tying ourselves to Multicraft severely limited what we were able to improve and change. It was important for us to create something new, something that is a significant improvement, so we decided to start from scratch and replace Multicraft all in one go.

As time went on, we compiled a todo list with many different features that we know are essential to managing a Minecraft server and worked to implement each one from scratch on this new platform; however, as we progressed through the beta, we realized that we were still missing key features that some people used, despite providing a fairly well-rounded control panel already. We felt that it was extremely important to provide all of the features that Multicraft provides from the start, so that we aren’t taking any features away. For that reason, we’ve postponed release over and over to make sure that we’re meeting those expectations and to ensure that we don’t disappoint our customers. We’ve taken every bit of feedback from you guys during the beta and worked hard to address it, and we’re still working on that right now. We’ll continue to use your feedback even after release to improve the panel.

Right now, we’re working on BukGet integration to provide an easy way to search for and install/uninstall plugins. We’ll be working to integrate SpigotMC resources into that as well, so you get plugins from both awesome sources. We’re also finishing up parts of the billing area and payment processes, as well as server upgrades/downgrades. That empty box will be filled eventually as well 🙂

Beta Ending

We will store all server data from the beta temporarily after the servers are shut down, so if you need to retrieve a copy, just send in a ticket and ask. We won’t be storing it for more than 14 days though, so please act fast to avoid losing anything important.

We’re really excited to finally provide some insight into what we’ve been cooking up over the past 9 months. Prisma is an entirely new Minecraft (and game) server management platform built from the ground up, with integrations for our billing and support systems. This means that you’ll have one control panel to manage everything, from changing your server’s settings to paying invoices and submitting support tickets. We built Prisma using the latest web technologies with one intention: making it easy to use. On top on that, we’ve focused hard on functionality and making it fast. No more slow consoles. No more confusing file managers and editors.

I’ll take you through a couple screens of the panel below. The user interface is still being worked on heavily and it’s definitely not finished, so stuff will change between now and release.

Here’s one of the screens you’ll probably spend a lot of time on. Our goal here was to simplify the process of simple management tasks like changing basic settings, viewing your resource usage, and controlling the server. Actions are instant and responsive, and the resource displays are fluid.

Believe it or not, it wasn’t difficult to improve on Multicraft’s console. Prisma’s console streams your server’s messages in realtime with just a few milliseconds of delay. In addition, we’ve built in detection for various types of messages in the console, so that the panel can react accordingly. One example of this is highlighting errors automatically. We plan to expand this even further over the next few weeks to make viewing your server’s errors/crashes even easier.

You’ll also notice that we placed start/stop/restart controls and server selector at the top of these pages. This continues across all server-related pages, so you can edit a file and restart your server or swap between servers with ease.

Another one of our main goals with Prisma was to provide a unified platform for managing everything, so you don’t have multiple logins to remember and you don’t have to keep switching back and forth. We’ve built billing and support functionality directly into Prisma to make your life easier. Now all of your payment and invoice information is displayed in one place and you can easily see what’s coming up.

So, when will it be available? We still have lots of work to do. UI needs to be finished and tweaked. There’s still a lot of functionality and features we’re working on. Ultimately, we’re hoping for an initial release by the end of November, but we need your help. We need beta testers. Prisma will be in closed beta for the next couple of weeks while we get it ready for release. During this time, we need server owners to test out the features and interface, find bugs, and just break stuff in general. We can’t let you manage your existing servers with Prisma during this period (probably not a good idea anyway), so you’ll get a small, free Minecraft server for a few weeks to play around with.

Otherwise, we’ll do our best to stick to the schedule and start rolling it out in a few weeks. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments, or concerns, just get in touch with our support team! They’ll pass the message along to our development team 🙂

We’ve started getting a lot of questions about adding support for Pocket Edition version 0.12.X. Our MCPE servers run on the PocketMine server software which is currently being developed for 0.12.X. There are some early bleeding edge versions, but we won’t be deploying these to our MCPE platform as they haven’t been tested. Once PocketMine promotes a new development build that’s compatible with MCPE 0.12, we’ll get it added to the control panel right away.

Until that time, you won’t be able to join your server if you’ve updated your game to 0.12; therefore, we recommend that you stay on 0.10 or 0.11.

Experimental versions of MCPE 0.12 have been added to the control panel, but we still recommend sticking with 0.11 as these most definitely have bugs.

We’ll keep this post updated so check back to see the latest status on MCPE v0.12.

We’ve finally finished, tested, and pushed out some big changes to our backend systems allowing us to support Java 7 and Java 8 simultaneously, as well as a lot of improvements to the server startup and modpack installation/update processes.

Java 8 Support

This is one of the most exciting upgrades to our system recently. Your server will now automatically select Java 7 or 8 based on the type of server you’re using. Vanilla Minecraft, Spigot, CraftBukkit, and BungeeCord will automatically use Java 8. Other server types such as Forge and Cauldron, as well as FTB, ATLauncher, and Technic modpacks, will use Java 7. You can override this setting by editing the .java_version file via FTP, then restarting your server.

There are three settings you can choose from: “auto”, 7, and 8. The auto setting will pick the best version for your server automatically. The other two are fairly self-explanatory. Please note that many modpacks are not compatible with Java 8, so changing this setting can cause your server to stop working. If that happens, you can simply delete the .java_version file or switch it back to “auto”, then restart your server.

Server and Modpack Installation / Updates

We’re working to streamline this process in preparation for our new control panel. In the meantime, this means faster and more efficient modpack installations and updates. That also includes server types that aren’t modpacks as well, including vanilla Minecraft, BungeeCord, etc.

As usual, you can enable automatic updates under Files -> Config Files -> Automatic Updates in Multicraft. Once enabled, each time you restart your server, it will check for an update.

We’re hoping to share some screenshots of the new control panel soon, so check back often!

It’s been a bit since our last blog post so I figured it was time for a brief update. Over the past 4 months, our team has been hard at work on all of those projects we mentioned in our What’s New post back in November. We’re really excited to get these rolled out but we’re not there just yet.

Features, ease of use, and customization drive our service here at CubedHost – it’s our job to provide you with a Minecraft server that not only performs flawlessly, but is also easy to manage and maintain. Whether it’s updating config files, creating backups, installing plugins, mods, or modpacks, or just chatting with your players, our control panel should allow you to do all of those tasks with ease, plus more. But let’s be honest here – Multicraft isn’t the easiest to work with a lot of times. Don’t get us wrong, Multicraft has been an incredible tool since CubedHost began; however, even after tweaking and customizing it over the years, we believe it’s still holding us back. Holding us back from offering awesome new features and capabilities that would make managing your Minecraft servers easier and more fun. That’s our top priority this year.

The first building block in that plan is a new daemon. What’s a daemon? In terms of Minecraft server hosting, the daemon is the piece of software that runs on each of our nodes (physical servers) and keeps track of + controls your Minecraft server. Every time you press that start or stop button in the control panel, the daemon receives instructions to start or stop your server, sending a “stop” command and waiting for it to shut down. The daemon allows us to provide realtime server status, resource usage (RAM / CPU), and virtually all of the features available in the control panel. We’ve relied on the regular Multicraft daemon for this job for over 3 years, but it’s time for a change. We’re in the process of developing a brand new game server management daemon from the ground up using new technologies.

This new daemon will be faster, more secure, and more flexible. You’ll likely never interact with this new piece of software directly, but it plays a central role in allowing us to provide brand new features and build an awesome new control panel – that’s building block #2. After thorough testing, we’ll begin deploying our new daemon across all of our nodes and locations within the next couple of months (if not sooner). This process will be completely transparent and you shouldn’t notice any difference from the control panel or on your server.

Alongside the development of the new daemon, our team is also working on a brand new control panel built on a stack of new technologies. Because these two are being built side by side, they’ll be fully compatible from the start and we’ll be able to deploy the new control panel without any major interruption. Our primary focus with this new control panel is a slew of new and improved features as well as an easy to use design and UI. Some of the new features we’re working on include:

Overhauled server installation and automatic update system with support for every jar imaginable: CraftBukkit, Spigot, Cauldron, Forge, CanaryMod + ATLauncher, FTB, and Technic modpacks. Plus, a version selector for older, current, and dev releases of each modpack/jar.

A cloud backup system allowing you to create backups on-demand which are automatically uploaded to our cloud storage where they can be retrieve/restored at any time.

There are a lot of other features we wish we could talk about here, but we can’t give too much away just yet! I promise – we’re working hard every single day to get these projects closer to release. Once they’re nearly ready, we’ll release information about helping us out through beta testing.

If you’re a developer of any kind, please get in touch with us. We’re always looking for awesome new additions to our team and there’s never been a better time. Help us build some powerful new tools for our customers.

If you have suggestions for features and improvements for our new control panel or anything else, just open a ticket or hop on our live chat and let us know! Our front-line agents will be sure to relay the message 🙂

We’ll keep you updated with more info as these projects get closer to release. Stay tuned!